Epithalamia

Inhabiting the claustrophobia of marriage and domestic life, Erinn Batykefer’s poems use the deeply personal as the lens through which she investigates larger cultural ideas. She reckons with feeling simultaneously large and small, finding ways to face herself, and the need to be seen while within the confines of intimate relationships. Honest and explorative, these poems lead us through moments of fluctuation and faltering.

“Of the many things I’m wowed by in Erinn Baykefer's Epithalamia, what I appreciate most is how the poems enact a mind at work. They engage, with startling language and poetic form, the emotional oscillation of relationships—the combined beauty and peril that create the ecstatic state of self-transcendence. . . . With their lyric prowess and meditative sensibilities, these poems are both moving and powerful, the way our poetry should be.”

Nancy Reddy

"Erinn Batykefer’s striking new collection puts the form of the epithalamium to novel use: rather than celebrating marriage, these poems examine the danger inherent in intimacy, including not only the loss of the beloved, but the annihilation of the self. The collection is bracketed by remarkable poems in the voice of Jane Eyre, speaking from beyond the novel’s supposedly happy ending and into the troubled union that was to have been her reward. In another poem, the doomed speaker, a slave girl found beneath the ruins of Pompeii observes wryly that 'cataclysm is a lens,' and through that lens, these poems show us a world wracked by disaster, redeemed not through beauty but through unflinching attention to transformation and decay."

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